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The William Gates building...

I think I know who is really to blame for the cracked leaky building of death

Edxor, which supports encryption and if *fast*. Find it along with other Win32 stuff at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/fr eeware/.

So he that goes to law, as the proverb is, holds a wolf by the ears, or, as sheep in a storm runs for shelter to a briar. (Robert Burton (1577-1640) Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, Democritus to the Reader)

Microsoft was writing Windows 3.1, an important upgrade to the hugely popular Windows 3.0. In September 1991, a plan was hatched to use this upgrade to kill DR DOS. In an email discovered by the Dept. of Justice, the head of Windows development and Microsoft VP David Cole wrote, "aaronr had some pretty wild ideas after three or so beers--earleh has some too." The plan was to plant code into Windows which would "put competitors on a treadmill" and cause the system to "surely crash at some point shortly later." In order words, Windows would intentionally bomb if it detected DR DOS.

At this time, many computer vendors were considering switching from MS-DOS to the superior, cheaper DR DOS. Microsoft was especially concerned about IBM. Wooing these PC vendors was crucial to the future success of DR DOS, as was the good will of "early-adopters" (i.e., technically savvy users who drive new trends in the computer industry).

These vendors and early-adopters were also the same people who received a Christmas "beta" pre-release of Windows 3.1. They discovered--to their horror--that using DR DOS would cause vague system errors to pop up in Windows 3.1; they dumped DR DOS in droves. By the fourth quarter of 1992, sales of DR DOS had dropped from $15 million to only $1.4 million. The once mighty competitor became a has-been and was sold to Novell and later Caldera.

code_ptr = NULL;
data_ptr = NULL;
 
// get the code and data segments. Both functions are undocumented
data_seg = GetDosDataSeg();
code_seg = GetDosCodeSeg();
 
if (DosVersion == 6.0 )
  {
  code_ptr = FARPTR(code_seg:aaaa);
  data_ptr = FARPTR(data_seg:bbbb);
  }
 
if (DosVersion == 5.0 )
  {
  code_ptr = FARPTR(code_seg:cccc);
  data_ptr = FARPTR(data_seg:bbbb);
  }
 
if ( code_ptr && data_ptr )
// Patch away.
else
// shit unrecognized Dos version. Disable some features or die with an error?

I'm sure that it's a reference to the Billgatus of Borg or maybe the old joke

Put this in NICE3D.CMD:

@ECHO OFF
FOR /L %Z in (1,1,0) DO NICE -i 3dsmax.exe > NUL:

What? This closed source SureCrypt?

It's the first link returned by Google

I don't know about you guys but I just wanna watch Bill show this off and watch history repeat itself. Windows 98 Windows Live CES - XBox.

Oh, yeah, one I forgot: Garth Nix's Sabriel series. It's really, really good. Main characters are 2 teenage girls (well, one grows up, then the other one's the main character). High and deep fantasy.

Dan Aris

Using that logic, the GUI would never have been accepted because everyone at the time was far more familiar and proficient with the old DOS system.

No they don't. Because they got to define the criteria for inclusion themselves, there are lots of functions still not documented. Take a look at this page. It's a shame his usage page (linked from the page I just referenced) does not include MS Office -- I personally know of a few APIs that it uses that are dynamically loaded by ordinal , even in post-settlement versions, undoubtedly to obscure the fact.

This reminds me of Fractal Music. Its an application of mathematics (fractals) to produce 'unique' music. So, is what Wolfram's done really unique?

Better idea, send them all our dropbears.

They lacked the heavy aircraft which the USA used.

No. Germany had the largest plane used in WWII. They also had the most advanced bomber of the time. And of course, their mastery of jet engines was a decade ahead of the Allies.

Combining those excellent starting points into an effective long-range heavy bomber would take far less time than designing and manufacturing the hypothetical bomb itself. Even the unimproved Me-323 could carry an Hiroshima-like weapon.

Just because a DLL exports a function doesn't mean it's "exported for all the world to use". That is simply how DLLs work.

No, you see, there's a simple catch-22. Some of IE's functions are part of core OS DLLs that form the API of Windows.

If IE is the only program that uses those functions, then one of two circumstances has arisen. Those functions could be related to the DLL. But if that's the case, there seems to be some rather unfair tying of OS API and application. If on the other hand the code is unrelated, then MS has really horrible code practices for which the only reasonable excuse for scattering code through all the core OS DLLs is to ensure their existence by making it fundamentally impossible to extract all IE functions if they were so judged, hence they could use the truth that it'd be cost prohibitive to remove IE.

However, if IE is only one of many other programs that uses these functions, then clearly these functions are a part of the API, and if they've not been documented, then IE is using undocumented APIs. Whether or not this actually leads to better performance is a moot point because the issue would mean Dave is lying and MS is using undocumented APIs in IE.

How I see it, it looks like it's a combination of all three that's occuring. The fact that IE is the only program which has actually taken advantage of its own API seems a rather moot point.

Here is a relink of relevant information: Missing Settlement Functions

Geoff Chappell has news for you. It doesn't make Chen look too good.

Can somebody - Dave? - point me to the API that let IE4 add a "Favourites" item to the start menu in Windows 95? I don't mean something that was documented last year, I mean something that was documented ... in 1995. I don't think there is such an API. I don't think there ever was.

Can somebody - Dave? - tell me why the IE installer calls the undocumented Extract cabinet.dll function?

As far as I'm concerned this is all very simple. Could Netscape have done to Windows 95 what Microsoft did with IE4? Obviously the answer is no: IE did things that weren't just *adding* APIs, they were replacing core parts of the OS like Explorer in order to add the Favourites menu, Active Desktop etc etc. Dave is full of shit and the sad thing is, he probably believes his own story.

I very heavily use my thumb drive on school/library pubic systems, and have an allmost entirely different set of programs i use:
For AIM:
TerrAIM ,sure its ugly, but it works a lot better than miranda
For IRC:
Dana I acutally use this little IRC client whenever im in windows, even on my own machines. very light and fast.
For Remote:
Both RealVNC and PuTTY
My favorive text editor:
Notepad++
And a number of tools from DS Software Notably TaskKill.

I wish my microbee survived this long... it barely managed 10 years.

Forget that horid wait while 100K of HTML downloads when the application just wanted to update one field on the page.

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scunge/shazam/

That is, unless the term "first family" was being used in a presidential sort of way, but even then I'd give it to the "Big Red Cheese" and co.

I hearby award you a prize

Schubert's pdf plugin for Mac OS X. Plays with all browsers, simple to install and fully featured.

A collection of handy tools written in x86 assembly can be found at DS Software
"...small executable file - self-contained and dependency-free - installation-and-pollution- free - freeware status..."

Edxor is my notepad replacement on any Windows install.

Well, there are a couple of articles from the NY Times here, and one on the WASC website.

France, who was quite angry about Echelon, admits it.

"....all secret services of the big democracies undertake economic espionage." - French ex-intelligence chief

It is possible, just not using a standard RDMBS. I worked at a company a few years back that used Pick (multi-relational) databases. Being a SQL/RDBMS guy, I never quite 'got it', but have a look at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~dhona/pick.html for an intro.

Get a hold of Blender for 3D animation and rendering. You can use Terragen to create photorealistic landscapes. You can grab a kick-ass free model of the martian tripod, or if you've got $65 to spare, you could buy a pre-made model of a martian tripod. I don't recall what type of ship the Thunderchild was supposed to be, so I can't provide a link to that, but there are lots of free models you can find for that, too. That should just about do it... all you need for a CGI recreation of the scene, on a budget of $0.

If you don't like CGI, you could just make a paper model of the martian tripod and shoot it on video in your kitchen sink. The quality might suffer a bit, though.

There's a really cool collection of various WotW artwork here that should help inspire you.

XML would allow you to define (in a DTD/Schema...) the kinds of data that the form should be collecting and do it in a format neutral way. Then you could use web pages (translate the XML automatically to XHTML, grab the data and translate back). This can be fairly easily automated as could other methods to handle the input. PDF and DOC (and its cousins) are poor substitutes as you can't as easily identify the important information in the document, you can't store it concisely and you can't then do semantic level searches on it. Furthermore, in XML processing you can do consistency checks and so on.

In a web setting (or similarly "connected" kind of configuration) you could pre-populate much of the data for the user. You could even "compile" the xml to a set of online forms (XML -> GLADE or the MS .NET XML window description thing).

Once the data is entered into XML it can be massaged and output in any needed format (I don't know of any free XML to DOC format converter, but I suspect that the XML enabled MS Office stuff can do it if needed).

By the way, while that first step is easy to say, actually defining the DTD/Schema/... is likely to be rather difficult. (Look up sometime what it takes to specify an address.) But this difficulty pays off immensely in that you know much more about your data, and much more about the ways it might be used. Once this is done though, the other parts are really pretty straightforward.

It might take a bit of work, but in the long term coding this up in XML is likely to save far more work and money.

No, you're looking for Windaz Ecks Pee (Coming soon, until then, use Windaz Tew Thowsand.

I don't know if this goes into Computer Science or Musicology, but people have tried composing music using mathematical equations for quite some time...

For example, I propose (also an example here

This site also gives fractal and algorithmic music to download while this one give you the opportunity to download a fractal music software (Windows, sorry)

Maybe we can get a computer to compose like Mozart and finish his symphonie ?

Something like these people do :
"We are a group of students and faculty members in the University of Wisconsin - Madison working on the exciting project of applying artificial intelligence in analyzing and composing music.

In this research, mathematical models will be developed to analyze a given collection of music pieces, represented in MIDI format. In particular, machine learning and artificial intelligence problem solving methods such as neural network, time series prediction, and statistical pattern classification will be used, and to simulate the process of music composition through the results of analysis. The overall objective is to analyze polyphonic music of certain composers, and create new pieces that retain stylistic details which distinguish composers from one another. "

You can even dowload some of their computer generated music...

As you yourself said, "individuals with a hobby that have brought formidable computing skills and analysis techniques from other fields" (really nice javadoc...) but I'm not sure they "are largely ignorant of the works within music departments", as they seem to take a nice approach on the subject...

Luke 10:25-37 (NRSV)
For more, go here

Well, baking a potato presents challanges beyond just warming food, but yes, I'd say my maxim holds, a '55 Chevy would be my choice over a 2004. They like to pretend that things like exhaust manifolds don't exist these days and hide them from you as best they can. Today's cars seem to have more plastic cover than engine, judging by just lifting the hood.

I wouldn't just go sticking a potato into any old crevice in the exhaust manifold though. You have to prepare yourself with an engine oven. Either buy one of the commercially available items ( U.S. Patent Classification 126/19.5), make your own, Manifold Cooking, or arrange to make do with a cast iron dutch oven. Wrap well in aluminum foil and no " 40 weight taste" at all.

It will take some hours to properly bake a potato though. In my estimation rarely worth the effort, no matter the results. I'm perfectly happy to live on gorp and other such ambient temperature foodstuffs until I get a fire going, even if it's days between fires, and rice packs better than potatoes. You can fit an ungodly amount of rice packed in ziplocks in all sorts of little nooks and crannies of your vehicle, and it doesn't go bad.

KFG

I'll check out your link though, because I do need extra features occasionally. Thanks

it seems Bill's looks an awful lot like my windows desktop.

Hell I'll take a Powerloader for the time being.

I don't know much about Microsoft Windows, which is to say, I know even less about Windows than the little I know about Linux or Mac OS / Mac OS X. The reasons why are partly philosophical (I like Free software), partly monetary (I like free software) but mostly aesthetic (YMMV, but I like both the various Apple OSes and various *nix varieties more than I have ever liked Windows, *shrug*,no accounting for taste). That said, I've found that some software for Windows goes on easy, some doesn't -- the one time I made the mistake of actually *installing* Windows 98 on a computer, the process failed at multiple points and led to an all-day hair-pulling fest. Hardware problem? Maybe, but that hardware ran Linux fine ... My limited experience since then with Windows software has been mostly attempts to help my dad install drivers for gadgets he's bought for his several computers. My conclusion about those is that most drivers may *install* correctly, but are hampered by very poorly constructed configuration phases in the form of "Wizards" which are not very wizardly, just ambiguous exercises in condescending presumption. It's lovely when the light on a wireless card shows it's powered up and getting signal, but the driver that comes with the card says it can find no appropriate hardware ... PnP, whatever :) Isn't this the year 2003?

If you see *nix software installation as downloading sources, configuring and compiling, then Yes, it would be a bear to anyone new to it. However, that's not the only way to install software on Linux -- software installation has come a long way in the last several years.

[Aside #1: OK, I'll take back what I said about my Windows experience being mostly about installing random drivers for peripherals: I sometimes upgrade other people's Windows machines by adding various free software pieces, and for the software I add, the effort of installation is about the same either way, when unzipping / untar-ing with Linux vs. using WinZip or similar under Windows.]

[Aside #2: A surprizing number of Windows machines don't have an unzipping utility built in, at least machines running Windows 98. I thought it was included, if not part of the actual OS -- am I wrong? Maybe people just throw it away, or stash it in a folder that the OS doesn't search when finding appropriate apps for compressed archives? This, like the 'just hit enter' password screen, will remain one of the Windows Universe's mysteries. In such cases, I download an unzipping utility; I found one tonight called FreeZip, which I used to put Mozilla Firebird on an unsuspecting friend's computer ... for another friend, same thing a few nights back, and on her computer we used some other random unzipping utility. Where does WinZip disappear to? Or did I just hallucinate that it used to be on Windows machines by default? Are there any good open-source unzipping programs that work on Windows? What is the airspeed velocity of a coconut-laden European swallow?]

However, if your system can use apt-get (Debian, Red Hat) or Mandrake's urpmi, these (in most cases) wins hands-down vs. the various 'unzip, then run an installer' methods. I *have* run into some weirdnesses with apt-get (like when upgrading a 700k program tries to trigger a 300MB total system upgrade ... huh?), but I will echo another respondent by suggesting the front-end called Synaptic. Synaptic is really quite good ... it's not *completely* transparent (what is?) and it certainly is not perfect, but anything I can get to work I figure must be child's play for anyone else :)

Once it's set up on your machine though, apt-get install $softwarepackage is a pretty low-impact installation method.

[Aside #3: The "last couple of years" stuff includes synaptic, but not apt-get itself, which has been around for a while now :) Two other projects which cer

And let's not forget the almighty Microbee.

Drug addicts are called 'users'. Customers are called 'customers', or 'Sir' or 'Ma-am'. If we can just manage to stop insulting them every time we refer to them, we're probably half way towards gaining some kind of acceptance already.

It's an insipient problem, and one that infects even the largest of marketing departments. Australia's largest ISP for example calls it's customers 'users', to their faces. They even have this big DSL-in-a-box campaign with a DSL modem and all the stuff you need in a nice shrink-wrapped box on the shop shelves. The big promo version of the box has an oh-so-politically-correct Australian-guy/Asian-girl couple hugging, with the postscript "John and Tam, Ozemail users". I mean, what are these marketeers on?

How about we deal with giving the customers a little respect first, and deal with shoving our favourite OS down their throats just a little bit later on?

Drug addicts are called 'users'. Customers are called 'customers', or 'Sir' or 'Ma-am'. If we can just manage to stop insulting them every time we refer to them, we're probably half way towards gaining some kind of acceptance already.

It's an insipient problem, and one that infects even the largest of marketing departments. Australia's largest ISP for example calls it's customers 'users', to their faces. They even have this big DSL-in-a-box campaign with a DSL modem and all the stuff you need in a nice shrink-wrapped box on the shop shelves. The big promo version of the box has an oh-so-politically-correct Australian-guy/Asian-girl couple hugging, with the postscript "John and Tam, Ozemail users". I mean, what are these marketeers on?

How about we deal with giving the customers a little respect first, and deal with shoving our favourite OS down their throats just a little bit later on?

Put it like this. You know when you get the occasional search results even in Kazaa Lite K++ that for some reason are always remotely queued, and the host disappears, or might not even be publicly routable or a transient BGP? You know that strange traffic between supernodes?

That's us. We are direct action anti-RIAA activists, using vulnerabilities in the Fasttrack protocol to poison the Kazaa network's results just enough to throw doubt into the mix. We may or may not be doing the same for Gnutella, though we hear Shareaza's G2 is good.

While not really affecting the users of the network, try asking Overpeer, Mediaforce and so on why they've been getting all these bogus results. In fact, try asking where the hell Mac Granny came from, how, and why.

The doubt isn't usually enough to impinge on a civil case, sadly, they don't actually need proof for that just a preponderance of evidence, it could probably never be unless we flooded the network into oblivion... (the Mac Granny was, we feel, us getting lucky or the RIAA slipping up) but ask yourself why the RIAA aren't using the NET Act for criminal prosecutions? Because they can't PROVE anything. They don't even download the files to check; if they did, they'd find they were garbage, but apparently shared by a legitimate user who's turned off sharing. And remember: "For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement." - 17 U.S.C. sub.sec. 506(a)(2)

The P2P networks' greatest weaknesses and vulnerabilities, in the absence of anonymity, can be their strength. They seek to drive the pirates underground, back into their little blacknet cells... but today's blacknets are tomorrow's release groups in training.

And once a good anonymous p2p system eventually comes along (obviously not Freenet, and even more obviously not ES5), one that hits critical mass like Napster and Kazaa did, with the peak speed of BitTorrent but virtually firewall-proof, highly attack-resistant and virtually untraceable... what will be our enemies' recourse then, now that their tactics have trained new cells of hardcore pirates releasing even more quality material impossibly early for the masses to leech anonymously?

What are they going to do? Sue themselves for, by litigation, finally evolving a p2p network they can't fight? No, they're going to threaten the users, whether they know they're sharing or not. That's where we come in again... and where I sign out.

I'll suggest CommuniGate from Stalker too. It's a really nice package. Amazingly robust and an easy install.

The webmail is unbearably ugly out of the box but it is easily skinned and the EudoraLook system is fantastic.

They have a MAPI connector and their LDAP is alleged to play well with others. The calendar supports iCal and vCal. They have pretty good clustering support. It is a fairly powerful package that scales down well.

Plus the user community is kind and helpful. Good stuff.

The downside of CommuniGate is the administration interface. The program has a lot of features but finding and configuring them is not always easy.

For five users I would go with nothing. Outsource it. Why maintain a server for five people unless you want to use that server as a learning environment. If it is a learning environment do you really want to use a production machine?

Good luck,

Dan

I like to use the World View of Live Webcams to get my voyeuristic fix. It's kept fairly up to date, and has hundreds of cams.

Did anyone ever verify whether or not the AOL IM client updated itself through a buffer overrun?

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~geoffch/security/ai m/index.html

At the time, they didn't have an alternative. CVS has been stagnant for quite some time. Bitkeeper arose from conversations between the McVoy and Linus. McVoy wanted to help Linus (and probably himself) and had knowledge of SCM systems, so he built one.

I have no idea if BK is any good, but I do know there are flaws with CVS and it's free kin. Arch hasn't caught on, and Subversion development has been painfully slow (first release was in 2000/10) and it seems like a very heavy installation. Features like internationalization and supporting symlinks won't even make it into v1.0 (which should be out sometime shortly before duke nukem...)

I remember aegis from around 1995 or so when I read this report and it was free back then.

In fact, WindowMaker is coded in C, using the WINGS--WINGS Is Not GNUStep widget library. WindowMaker is designed to cooperate with the GNUstep environment, though.

Though NextStep was designed to "look good" it was also designed to be easy to program. If you only install WindowMaker, you would be missing out on the AppKit-- Next's programming framework. (At least on my Mac, it's easy to use. I've never used the OpenStep/NextStep implementations.)

What the fuck are you talking about? Have you even the slightest comprehension of how the protocols PGP uses work?

Please, I emplore you to go read this introduction and maybe supplement it with this document before your brain conjours up another thought.

You do have the right idea, however. Public key authentication is useful for so many things and this is one of them. Basically, all parties involved have public and private key pairs established before any transactions take place. After that, all messages for transactions are then signed so the sender can prove their identity to the recipient. If the signature of the message is invalid, the message is ignored. The adversary in this case, spammers, are probably not sophisticated enough to acquire the private key of either party (assuming good cryptographic policy is adhered to) or solve the factoring dillema on which public key cryptography is based.

It all comes down to authentication. If you have a system in place where a message can be authenticated, you have that much more security. If not, you get situations like these where the stakes are high and forgeries are nearly trivial.

Freezip is my favorite zip program. Simple, to the point and does everything I need.

Here are the links:

- Misogyny Unlimited = http://members.ozemail.com.au/~ksolway/misogyny.ht ml
- Skin Two (Fetish doll, as a seperate part has been removed) = http://www.skintwo.com/index_2.html

And, since I can't find the "no pants page", this should do nicely on slashdot:
Lord of the Pants

You can even download a plug-in that allows Windows XP to provide information on Vorbis files in Explorer, just as it does with MP3s and WMAs

Is there a database, or method of recording this data, in electronic form, that will stand up in court?
Or rather: Is there a reliable web service (a "trusted authority") that provides unique time stamps?

Is there a database that once a record is entered with an accompanying time and date stamp, cannot be altered?
And don't forget: Is there a way to prevent records being inserted in between older journals, at a later time?

Or ...Maybe some of that infamous write only memory would solve your problems?

--
The human brain is a wonderful thing: It starts working the moment you are born, and never stops until you stand up to speak in public -- Sir George Jessel

I did some looking around on Google and found this paper, which briefly covers the subject by suggesting a "security mesh" to prevent unauthorized access to wlans. Anyone with some insight in how [cost] effective this may be, or if there are any other solutions out there?